Contabo is a German hosting company that has sold servers since 2003 — VPS, dedicated machines and object storage — at some of the lowest prices on the market. Raff Technologies is a US cloud provider where the virtual machine is one product among several, alongside managed databases, object storage, Functions and Kubernetes on the same account. Both sell shared-vCPU VMs, so the comparison is a fair one: Contabo Cloud VPS Plus 4 is €13.50/month (about $15.65) for 4 vCPU and 8 GB, and the closest Raff plan is $30.99/month. What differs is not really the server. It is what sits around it, and what you do when one server is no longer enough.
Contabo VPS and Raff at a glance
Contabo is a German hosting provider with data centers across Europe, the US, Asia and Australia, rated 4.6/5 on Trustpilot. Its VPS catalog splits three ways. Core VPS is the budget line from €5.50/month on SSD with 200 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s ports and 1–3 snapshots. Performance VPS, branded Cloud VPS Plus, is the NVMe line from €13.50/month with 500 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s ports and 5 snapshots. Max Performance VPS sits above it, and Cloud VDS offers dedicated cores. Both VPS lines run AMD EPYC — the Core-class VMs benchmarked below reported EPYC 7282 — so storage and port speed, not CPU family, separate them. Contabo advertises 99.9% uptime, unlimited traffic and a free firewall with DDoS protection across the range.
Raff Technologies runs 15,000+ VMs for 3,000+ customers from its us-east region, with a 99.9% uptime SLA backed by service credits, rated 4.5/5 on Trustpilot and 4.6/5 on G2. VMs run AMD EPYC with DDR5 ECC memory and NVMe storage in two lines: General Purpose with shared vCPU from $4.99/month, and CPU-Optimized with dedicated vCPU from $9.99/month, scaling to 16 vCPU and 32 GB. Every plan includes a 3 Gbps port with unmetered transfer, automated Daily or Weekly backup schedules, uncapped snapshots, firewall controls, private networking and full root access.
The catalogs differ past the VM. Raff sells S3-compatible object storage at $7/month for 100 GB and 1 TB of egress, managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey, ClickHouse and Kafka from $7.99/month, managed Kubernetes with a free control plane and workers from $9.99/month, Functions with a free monthly tier, block volumes at $0.08/GiB-month, and Raff Apps from $3/month.
Contabo VPS pricing vs Raff pricing
Contabo Performance VPS uses shared AMD EPYC cores, so the like-for-like Raff line is General Purpose.
| Contabo shape | Contabo Performance VPS | Raff General Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 4 vCPU / 8 GB | €13.50 (about $15.65) · Plus 4 · 150 GB NVMe · 500 Mbit/s | $30.99 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 160 GB NVMe · 3 Gbps |
| 6 vCPU / 12 GB | €19.00 (about $22.03) · Plus 6 · 300 GB NVMe · 500 Mbit/s | no 6-core plan · closest is $37.99 at 8 vCPU / 8 GB · 160 GB NVMe · 3 Gbps |
| 8 vCPU / 24 GB | €35.00 (about $40.58) · Plus 8 · 450 GB NVMe · 1 Gbit/s | $115.99 · 8 vCPU / 32 GB · 640 GB NVMe · 3 Gbps |
| 12 vCPU / 48 GB | €59.00 (about $68.40) · Plus 12 · 600 GB NVMe · 1 Gbit/s | $90.99 · 12 vCPU / 24 GB · 480 GB NVMe · 3 Gbps |
| 16 vCPU / 64 GB | €79.00 (about $91.58) · Plus 16 · 750 GB NVMe · 1 Gbit/s | $129.99 · 16 vCPU / 32 GB · 640 GB NVMe · 3 Gbps |
Raff General Purpose against Contabo Performance VPS — both shared AMD EPYC on NVMe. Raff CPU-Optimized from $9.99/mo is the match for Contabo Cloud VDS. Contabo standard monthly rates, read 2026-08-18, excluding the discounted first-24-month rate; €1 = $1.1593 (ECB, 2026-08-17).
At the matched 4 vCPU / 8 GB shape Raff is about 98% more expensive. Higher up the range Contabo also sells memory shapes Raff does not offer at any price: 48 GB at 12 cores and 64 GB at 16 cores. Contabo is the cheaper product, and at the memory-heavy end it is the only product.
Contabo's Core VPS line for reference
Core VPS is the budget line, also AMD EPYC but on SSD with lower port speeds. It is not the like-for-like match, and it is the line benchmarked below — worth seeing beside the others:
| Shape | Core VPS (SSD) | Performance VPS (NVMe) | Raff General Purpose (NVMe) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 vCPU / 8 GB | €5.50 (about $6.38) · 100 GB · 200 Mbit/s | €13.50 (about $15.65) · 150 GB · 500 Mbit/s | $30.99 · 160 GB · 3 Gbps |
| 8 vCPU / 24 GB | €14.00 (about $16.23) · 300 GB · 600 Mbit/s | €35.00 (about $40.58) · 450 GB · 1 Gbit/s | $115.99 at 8 vCPU / 32 GB · 640 GB · 3 Gbps |
| 16 vCPU / 64 GB | €37.00 (about $42.89) · 500 GB · 1 Gbit/s | €79.00 (about $91.58) · 750 GB · 1 Gbit/s | $129.99 at 16 vCPU / 32 GB · 640 GB · 3 Gbps |
If your priority is the lowest price per gigabyte of RAM and SSD is acceptable, Core VPS is the cheapest option on this page by a wide margin.
Bandwidth and transfer
Neither provider meters standard outbound transfer. Contabo lists unlimited traffic under a fair-use policy; Raff includes unmetered transfer. The difference is the pipe: Contabo Performance VPS runs 500 Mbit/s on Plus 4 and Plus 6 and 1 Gbit/s from Plus 8 up — its own headline is "Unlimited Traffic up to 1 Gbit/s" — while every Raff plan runs a 3 Gbps port regardless of tier. At the matched shape that is a six-fold difference in ceiling. Unlimited transfer on a 500 Mbit/s port and unmetered transfer on a 3 Gbps port are not the same product.
Automated backups
Raff includes a free backup and snapshot storage pool — 50 GB per account plus 10–15% of each VM's disk — with Daily and Weekly schedules you configure yourself, retention from 1 to 365 days, and uncapped snapshots. Storage above the pool is $0.06/GB-month. Contabo Performance VPS includes 5 snapshots and sells automated backups as a paid add-on at checkout. Compare the configured price, not the headline price, if scheduled backups are a requirement.
Location and term
Contabo's advertised rates are European base prices, and some US, Asian and Australian locations carry a surcharge — confirm the price for the region you need. The rates above are standard monthly prices; the advertised lower rate is a 24-month commitment, not the ongoing price. Raff prices are not region-surcharged, bill monthly with no term, and carry a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Contabo VPS performance vs Raff
Methodology
Raff figures are internal, measured March–May 2026 on a 2 vCPU / 4 GB instance rather than the 4 vCPU / 8 GB shape priced above. Contabo figures are third-party, from VPSBenchmarks. Sequential throughput is shown in MB/s on both sides. Two Core VPS figures are withheld because they exceed Contabo's own newer NVMe tier by roughly four times — most likely page-cache effects rather than a real result.
Results
| Metric | Raff General Purpose | Contabo Performance VPS (Plus 4) | Contabo Core VPS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geekbench 6 single-core | 2,266 | 2,476 | 1,163 |
| Geekbench 6 multi-core | 4,057 (2 vCPU) | 8,157 (4 vCPU) | 4,700 (4 vCPU) |
| fio 4K read, 50/50 mix | 48,670 IOPS | 15,948 IOPS | 15,768 IOPS |
| fio 4K read, read-only | 74,562 IOPS | not published | not published |
| fio 1M sequential read | 2,491 MB/s | 534.8 MB/s | withheld |
| fio 1M sequential write | 1,257 MB/s | 570.4 MB/s | withheld |
| iperf3 peak † | 9,574 Mbps | 496 Mbps | 485–496 Mbps |
| CPU steal, sustained load | 0.13–0.32% over 26h | 0.00% avg and max | 3.08–4.26% |
| Request timeouts @ 120 req/s | not run | not run | 4,058 |
† Raff VMs publish a 3 Gbps port speed and are provisioned on 10 Gbps host uplinks in us-east. The 9,574 Mbps figure is a measured peak across parallel iperf3 streams, above the published per-VM rate — treat 3 Gbps as the committed speed, not 9.5.
What this tells you
On CPU the two are close. 2,476 against 2,266 single-core is about 9% apart, across separate tests on different days — inside the range where the honest answer is comparable rather than faster. CPU steal is effectively zero on both: 0.00% on Contabo Performance, 0.13–0.32% on Raff across a 26-hour run. Neither shows the shared-core variance that makes a server feel slow under load. If per-core CPU is all your workload cares about, this comparison does not separate them, and Contabo is cheaper.
Raff separates on throughput. Sequential 1M reads ran 2,491 MB/s against 534.8 MB/s, writes 1,257 MB/s against 570.4 MB/s, and the 4K mixed job 48,670 IOPS against 15,948. The network gap is structural rather than tuning: Plus 4 lists a 500 Mbps maximum and measured 496 Mbps.
The Core column shows what the cheap line gives up: roughly half the single-core score, 3.08–4.26% CPU steal under load, and 4,058 request timeouts at 120 req/s. CPU steal is time your VM was ready to run but waiting for a core held by a neighbour — at 3–4%, a server stays online and answers monitoring checks while individual requests queue. That is how a platform records high availability and slow page loads at the same time. It belongs to Core VPS, not to Performance VPS.
Contabo vs Raff: features and reliability
Compute
Contabo Performance VPS offers five shared AMD EPYC shapes from 4 to 16 cores and 8 to 64 GB RAM, with more memory per core than Raff sells at any tier. Raff offers General Purpose from $4.99/month and CPU-Optimized dedicated vCPU from $9.99/month, on AMD EPYC with DDR5 ECC memory, scaling to 16 vCPU and 32 GB. Raff plans resize on demand: stop the VM, switch plan, restart, with the difference settled to your account balance and a resize API endpoint for CPU, RAM and disk.
Networking
Raff includes a 3 Gbps port on every plan, private networking, VPC, firewall controls and site-to-site VPN gateways. Contabo includes a free firewall and DDoS protection, with port speeds of 500 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s on the Performance line.
Storage
Both lines use NVMe, but not in the same way. Contabo attaches local NVMe to the host. Raff runs distributed block storage across an NVMe cluster, so a write crosses the network and is replicated before it is acknowledged. What that model buys is everything around the disk: data replicated rather than pinned to one machine, snapshots and backups taken at the storage layer, and a VM that changes plan by stopping and restarting rather than being rebuilt. Block volumes at $0.08/GiB-month attach and resize independently for the same reason. Contabo ships more capacity per plan — 150 GB at 4 cores rising to 750 GB at 16 — against Raff's 160 GB and 640 GB at the same core counts.
Support
Raff provides 24/7 human support through live chat, with a first response typically under 10 minutes. No bots triaging you first, and no support tier to buy: a single $4.99 VM reaches the same engineers as a hundred production machines, through the same queue.
Contabo's help centre describes a different model. Live chat requires an active Contabo account and a login to the customer panel, and the conversation starts with ContaBro, a virtual assistant, before a human agent is reached. Phone support runs 08:00 to 23:00 European time. Ticket support accepts requests at any hour, but Contabo does not publish a response target.
The practical difference shows up twice: before you buy, when you cannot reach Contabo chat without an account, and at 3 AM, when a bot answers first.
Platform
This is the widest gap, and for most buyers the one that decides the question.
A VM is rarely the whole requirement. An application needs a database, somewhere to put uploads, background jobs, and eventually a way to scale beyond one server. On Raff those are products on the same account: managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey, ClickHouse and Kafka from $7.99/month, object storage at $7/month for 100 GB and 1 TB of egress, Functions with a free tier of 100,000 GB-seconds and 10,000 vCPU-seconds per month, Raff Apps from $3/month, and managed Kubernetes with a free control plane and workers from $9.99/month.
They connect over private networking rather than the public internet, share one API, one CLI and one bill, and the database you attach today is the one you scale next quarter. Contabo offers object storage and managed services alongside its servers, but the catalog is oriented around servers — a database, a queue and an object store assembled from separate places, each with its own credentials, billing and failure modes.
The honest counter-argument is that you can run Postgres on the same Contabo box for free. You can, and on a 48 GB plan it will run well. What you are then operating is backups, restore testing, failover, point-in-time recovery and version upgrades. If that work is inside your team's capability and time budget, Contabo is genuinely cheaper. If it is not, the question is not which VM costs less this month — it is what the second and third piece of your stack cost in time when you need them.
When you should choose Contabo over Raff
- Memory-heavy batch and analytics — 48 GB at 12 cores for €59.00 (about $68.40) and 64 GB at 16 cores for €79.00 (about $91.58); Raff sells no equivalent at any price
- Self-hosted storage, media and backup targets — 750 GB NVMe at the top tier against Raff's 640 GB, with unlimited traffic
- Large dev, test and CI fleets — comparable per-core CPU at roughly half the cost, where latency variation costs nothing
- Single CPU-bound servers — 2,476 Geekbench 6 single-core with 0.00% CPU steal, cheaper than Raff at every matched tier
- Users outside the United States — data centers across Europe, Asia and Australia against Raff's single us-east region
When you should choose Raff over Contabo
- User-facing APIs and web applications — 9,574 Mbps measured against 496 Mbps, on a 3 Gbps port at every tier (VPS for application hosting)
- Database-backed products — 48,670 4K read IOPS on a 50/50 mix against 15,948, and 2,491 MB/s sequential read, with managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey, ClickHouse and Kafka from $7.99/month on the same account (VPS for databases)
- Stacks that will outgrow one server — object storage at $7/month, Functions with a free monthly tier, Raff Apps from $3/month and managed Kubernetes with a free control plane, connected over private networking
- Production workloads that must recover — Daily and Weekly schedules on a free storage pool, retention from 1 to 365 days, and uncapped snapshots, against 5 snapshots with backups sold as an add-on
- Latency-sensitive services — CPU-Optimized dedicated vCPU from $9.99/month where shared-core variance is unacceptable
- Teams evaluating without commitment — monthly billing, a 14-day money-back guarantee, and no KYC verification step before first provisioning
Migrating from Contabo to Raff
- Right-size on measured utilisation — do not match core and RAM counts by default. Contabo's memory-heavy shapes are often larger than the workload needs.
- Plan the memory gap honestly — if you genuinely use 48 or 64 GB, Raff has no equivalent plan, and that is a reason to stay.
- Provision and harden — create the Raff VM on the same distribution, apply firewall rules, attach private networking before moving data.
- Move data in order — files with rsync or SCP, then database dumps, then static assets to object storage. Keep the Contabo VPS running throughout.
- Test under load, not at idle — the differences here appear under sustained traffic. Replay real traffic before switching DNS.
- Cut over and check the term — lower DNS TTL beforehand, switch, then confirm your Contabo billing term. A discounted 24-month rate continues after you migrate.
About Contabo
Contabo is a German hosting provider founded in Munich, offering Core, Performance and Max Performance VPS lines, Cloud VDS, dedicated servers and object storage from data centers in Europe, the US, Asia and Australia. It is known for high RAM and core counts at low monthly prices. See Contabo VPS for current plans and terms.
Conclusion: Contabo or Raff?
The comparison resolves across four measured axes:
- Price — Contabo wins: €13.50 (about $15.65) against $30.99 at 4 vCPU and 8 GB, roughly half, and cheaper at every tier above
- Per-core CPU — comparable, 2,476 against 2,266 Geekbench 6 single-core, with CPU steal effectively zero on both
- Throughput — Raff wins, 9,574 Mbps against 496 Mbps and 2,491 MB/s sequential read against 534.8 MB/s
- Platform — Raff adds managed databases from $7.99/month, Functions, object storage, Apps and Kubernetes to the same account, over private networking
If you are buying one server, CPU is what you care about, and price decides it, choose Contabo — per-core performance is comparable and it costs roughly half. If you are building an application that will also need a managed database, object storage, Functions or Kubernetes, choose Raff: those run on the same account, over private networking, on one bill.
Raff runs 15,000+ VMs for 3,000+ customers and is rated 4.5/5 on Trustpilot, with a 99.9% uptime SLA in writing.